A film about a loser and a loser of a film

News-Times, The (Danbury, CT)

Published
7:00 pm EST, Monday, February 7, 2005

Wanna laugh out loud at a movie not meant to be funny? Rent "The Forgotten."

"Shaun of the Dead" is about this dude named Shaun, who lives somewhere in England. He's really British - it's hard to understand him at times. Shaun's a bit of a slacker. He lives in a dingy apartment. He works in an electronics store, where the younger employees laugh at him because he's too old to be working there. Shaun has been dating the same girl for three years, taking her to the same cruddy pub he's been frequenting since college. She's on the verge of dumping him, but he's oblivious, of course.

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I won't call Shaun a loser, because there are way too many similarities between us for me to be critical.

Shaun's best friend is a fat dude named Ed, who sits on a couch all day playing video games. Ed doesn't work, other than the occasional drug sale to a buddy.

One day a flesh-eating zombie shows up in Shaun's garden. Shaun and Ed are rather amused. At first they think she's a drunk chick. They try to kill her by throwing records at her head.

Soon Shaun's town is overrun with zombies, a la "Dawn of the Dead." He hatches a plan that would make any slacker proud.

1. Pick up his mother

2. Pick up his girlfriend

3. Hole up in the neighborhood bar until the whole thing settles down

Naturally, this is a zombie movie, so things do not go as planned. Buddies get bitten, then try to eat him. Chaos ensues.

"Shaun of the Dead" has a laid-back British vibe going for it. His fat friend Ed doesn't take anything seriously - he sees the zombie apocalypse as an excuse to steal a Jaguar and mow down zombified pedestrians.

It's good for a few laughs.

"The Forgotten," on the other hand is laugh-out-loud funny. Too bad none of the humor is intentional.

She's married to
Anthony Edwards
. He tells her they never had a kid. OR DID THEY?

Then Julianne Moore runs into
Jimmy McNulty
from "The Wire." She tells him he had a kid. He says he didn't. OR DID HE?

There's lots of people from HBO shows in this movie. In addition to McNulty, there's the lieutenant from "The Wire," who tried to legalize drugs. At one point, McNulty slaps around Beecher, the reformed drunk from "Oz," the HBO prison drama.

Oh wait, back on point -"The Forgotten" is a terrible, terrible movie.

Turns out Julianne Moore did have a kid! It's just that aliens control the world. They were doing an experiment on the bond between mother and child, so they stole Moore's kid, THEN ERASED HER MEMORY!

How bad is this movie? Every few minutes, an invisible vacuum comes out of the sky and sucks away any character who comes close to figuring out the aliens' secret experiment. It's like something out of a
Bugs Bunny
episode.